Avdi Grimm wrote:

>> We've had a pretty civil discussion so far so I'd like to extend it to
>> ask if Ruby adherents do or do not see Ruby's current threading model as
>> a fairly major potential issue for someone thinking of moving from
>> Python to Ruby? My understanding is that a single blocking network call
>> will halt all threads which might mean hanging a GUI for example.
> 
> Let me just say that this is the single biggest problem that I see
> with Ruby.  To my mind, native threading support is a must for a
> language to be widely accepted.  Ruby's internal threading support has
> already demonstrated how elgantly Ruby can support common threading
> patterns - I'd love to see the ability to transparently drop in either
> Ruby-thread or native thread backends into a Ruby program, without
> changing anything but the threading class used.

I don't see what the problem is here; just use async I/O and avoid blocking 
calls. But then, I'm a Smalltalk user, and am already used to this idea 
(with most Smalltalks, you have the same potential problem with blocking 
I/O).